During one of our projects, we needed to automate deployment of the middleware layer. The reason for this was the high frequency of software updates, which sometimes meant we had to rebuild the middleware software layer. We used VMWare vCloud Automation Center to deploy multiple VMs in a short time frame, but we still needed to configure the different Microsoft Server roles and third-party software installations. To prevent errors during script execution, we created some rules on things like network connectivity to other servers or installed components checks. With this DevOps workflow, we created an automation flow that can deploy 120 VMs in just a couple of hours. This normally takes 4 hours per VM when we do the installation manually!
In this blogpost, I will just mention a couple of items and will get into the details of our script in later blogposts. The script can be divided into different parts. One of these parts involves logging the steps, as you want to know which steps have been successful (or not) and what time this happened. To start logging, you need to pipe the results to a file.